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Keir Starmer’s latest U-turn was a predictable one – the Chagos Islands bill. The Times reports that he has been forced to drop the bill from the King’s Speech on 13 May since Trump withdrew his support. It is a blow to the proponents of international law who are at the heart (and head) of Starmer’s administration who pushed for such legislation. The steady erosion of the Chagos bill has, to be sure, accompanied the souring of relations between Starmer and the Trump administration. Starmer’s refusal to assist Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz reflects the latest nadir in their relations.
And yet the government’s commitment to international law remains unyielding. Having identified Russian tankers and a warship in the Channel, the Navy has let them pass through, instead of seizing them, for fear of breaching international law. The Telegraph says that we owe this to the sagacious counsel of Lord Hermer. Were the ships to have been seized, the crews would have been able to claim asylum in Britain. Few satirists could expose the absurdity of the paralysing web of international human rights law which afflicts our ruling politicians.
This weekend Kemi Badenoch delivered an address to the London Defence Conference. It is newsworthy because it expressed an understanding of the impact of Trump better than all other opposition parties, to say nothing of the government itself. Badenoch proceeds from the assumption that Trump’s foreign policy has exposed ‘that without the United States we [Europe] cannot properly defend ourselves.’ She proposes ‘the biggest peacetime rearmament in our country’s history’ which would include the recruitment of 6,000 soldiers and 14,000 reservists.
Lastly, the recent closure of Hormuz has led rising energy costs. This has the potential to become a political crisis. Tony Blair has called on Ed Miliband to approve more drilling in the North Sea, with reference to the Jackdaw and Rosebank oil and gas fields. Furthermore, OpenAI has wound up its Stargate UK project until energy costs fall, upon which Starmer had been reliant for future growth.
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Political flux, the Chagos bill and Edmund Burke
The historian Norman Stone used to advise his pupils against using the word ‘inevitable’ in their history essays because, he said, nothing in the past was inevitable. (Except German counterattack, he would quip.) To be sure, the sinking of the Chagos bill was not at all inevitable. Quite the opposite: it seemed a fait accompli, having initially had Trump’s support.
But Starmer’s constipation over Iran provoked Trump to renege his commitment. Or, more accurately, Trump saw through the legal mist of the 99-year lease of the islands and how this would plainly compromise the Diego Garcia base. His initial support for the Chagos deal was less established in legal approval than in general diplomatic politeness towards Starmer.
This is the 16th policy reversal of this Labour government. We might reasonably ask, why does this keep happening? The eighteenth-century Whig statesman Edmund Burke might suggest an answer.
His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) were a comprehensive assault on the philosophical, moral and historical features of the French Revolution. It was, moreover, a coherent statement on the nature of political activity and thought which has been canonised as the foundation of political conservatism in Britain.
Burke believed that ruling was a matter of practice as opposed to theory – a distinction which recalled Aristotle. He attacked the ‘men of theory’ whose ‘abstract perfection is their practical defect’. Again: ‘This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot about his nature.’
What Burke says of theorists finds a resonance with the behaviour of our Prime Minister. Throughout his career as a politician Starmer has exhibited a blatantly cynical belief in politics as an activity for self-advancement, having shamelessly flown from Corbynism to Blairism, for example. And although Starmer hasn’t much by way of an ideology or doctrine, the Chagos bill expressed something of his simplistic yet deep belief in international human rights law (helped along of course by Lord Hermer, Philippe Sands and Jonathan Powell) in spite of the national interest.
Whilst the Chagos bill embodied such legal ideals, it was not immune from the contingencies of politics. Chagos was yet another exhibition of Starmer’s lack of subtly and tact. It was almost as though the Chagos policy was grounded on the hope that Trump would be too distracted to notice the consequences for the Diego Garcia base.
Burke would have understood Starmer perfectly well: ‘When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade, or totally negligent of their duty.’
